Grounded
by froldgapp
Summary: There was no rulebook for the life they'd made. All Krolia could do was make it up as she went along.


Earth's flora was a wonder to her. Vibrant greens that exploded in sweeping fronds or broad, waxy leaves. The flowers had petals of every colour conceivable; clever things that turned their joyful faces towards the sun–so unlike the stalky, synthetic plants of the Marmora base. She filled the little cabin with them and tended to them passionately. She studied their growth. Took notes. Learned their quirks, their character. Despite her scientific nature and the grumblings from Kogane about water wastage, she created her dear oasis in the Earth desert; full of love, full of life.

When the child finally arrived, it was much like every other critical event in her life: surprising yet nothing much to perk her ears at. The first pangs came just as she was seeing to her troublesome corn plant. She replaced the bright green watering can on the porch railing, waddled inside, and used the back of a chair to lower herself to the cool tiles. She pushed until the youngling slid out of her and onto the kitchen floor.

Kogane arrived not long after to find her severing the cord with her blade. The child–a pink and wailing boy–lay nestled against her thigh. There wasn't as much blood as she expected.

'Jesus Christ,' Kogane said. 'Are you–is he okay?'

'Of course,' she said, and nudged the blotchy infant with one thigh. He screamed with more ferocity. 'He has very healthy lungs.'

Her partner rushed forward, face ashen. He placed one palm beneath the little skull, all covered in thick hair, gluey with fluid and black as night.

'You have to support his head, for Christ's sake, Krolia!'

'Why?' She laughed, and was rewarded with a dead stare of disbelief. He stopped short of putting his head in his hands. 'Oh,' she said. 'Can you finish watering the dracaena? They're looking a bit dry.'

OoO

Keith doesn't look at her as he flies. His violet eyes stare dead ahead. She can read his violent emotions in the set of his jaw and how his hands worry at the joysticks though. He is deciding whether or not he hates her. She isn't sure which she'd prefer, but knows very much what she deserves.

OoO

He was a happy child, but desperately curious. And very fast.

'Where is he?' she asked, ears tilting towards the sounds of creeping lizards and dripping water as she tried to locate him. They were amongst the caves. She had lost him again, despite the fact that human development was terribly slow and he was still unable to walk properly. It was a wonder humans were the dominant species. She thought horses much more elegant.

Kogane jolted upright from where he was laying out a blanket, celery spilling from the small picnic basket hooked across his elbow. 'What do you mean? You were watching him!'

Krolia tutted and folded her arms. She looked down a long channel to her left and heard the shuffling of her little terror.

'Kitty!' came a call that was more bird than infant, frankly. Keith's voice was chalky and sweet. When grumpy, he had to suck in a great lungful of air before he could muster a yell. There was no grumpiness today. He was always happiest outside. He sounded jubilant at his discovery. 'Kitty! Kitty!'

They dashed in Keith's direction.

'He has your gift,' Kogane called, tugging her by the arm towards their son and the lion murals.

The blue lion murals were a blight on her time on Earth: a reminder of what lay beyond their cabin, the pot-plant oasis, and the sweet life she built here. She stumbled, but caught herself on the next step. Kogane looked back at her, but she could not meet his eye.

OoO

'Keith,' she tries.

He is closing down their little cruiser, having docked at the Castle of Lions shortly before. His hands are shaking so badly he can't punch in the lockdown codes correctly.

'Keith…' She edges close to him, but his entire being stiffens and there's an audible hiss of anticipation. Terror radiates from him.

He tries to dial in the numbers again, fails again, and thumps the console so hard the casing cracks beneath his fist. Laying her hand on top of his, she realises all over again how small he is: how small and soft and round and young. How alive.

'Keith, I am sorry.'

He doesn't look at her, but neither does he withdraw his hand. He is panting through his nose, distressed. She thinks he may be weeping behind that shower of glistening hair.

'It's okay,' he says. 'You don't have to say sorry.'

'It's not and I do.'

'Why?' He doesn't have to finish the question. His soulful eyes have always done most of his talking for him. _Why did you leave?_

'I couldn't take you with me. I was walking into a war. You belonged on Earth. Safe.'

He bites his lip and looks away.

'Keith. Son.'

At last, he raises his head and looks at her with bright eyes. 'Krolia.' The word–her name–is a dagger. 'Really, I understand.' He pulls in a deep breath and closes his eyes, seems to draw strength from some unspoken mantra. 'We all do things in this war we don't want to. I believe you. I know you had to go. I'm sorry too. But…' He chews over the next words. 'I never belonged there.'

'Keith,' she whispers.

He eases his hand out from under hers. He is so gentle, she admires. The burning violence she'd seen back on the base has softened to the ember trail of a shooting star. 'I'm sorry,' he says. 'I'm sorry too.' His voice is the barest touch, a velvet petal.

'Are you...Are you…' She can't find the words. She feels stupid under his inadvertent scrutiny. 'Are you happy?'

He blinks back at her. The question has caught him off guard. He begins to punch in the codes again. 'I'm alive,' he answers as the ship powers down.

OoO

'You can't leave.' Kogane said everything like it was fact. She hated him for it. 'You can't leave us here. We're a family.'

Keith was outside on the porch. She could hear him chittering away happily to the ants and beetles. His recent obsession was feeding every creature honey water; clapping excitedly when exhausted bees recovered and climbed into the air again. Her garden, like most everything in their household, wasn't safe from his ministrations. She often found pop-tarts and grapes in the pots. She once found a sapling tucked up in bed with him. 'Pop-tarts don't belong in plant pots, pet,' she'd scold mildly. 'And shrubs don't belong in little boy's beds.'

She'd taught him what belonging meant.

He seemed to accept the wisdom each time, but would find ways to bend the rules regardless. He'd march every creature on Earth into his little cot if he could. He was so unlike the two of them. He didn't have a single hard edge.

Kogane slammed her dagger down on the enamel sink. The taps rattled in their loose fittings. 'You talk as though you don't have a choice.'

'You know I don't,' she replied. She searched deep within herself for the soldier she used to be. 'The safety of the universe is more important than any single family.'

'But we're your family!' Kogane cried, exasperated. 'You have a son!'

'My child's life is not worth more than any other child's,' she bit back. 'You know this. You're a scientist as well as a pilot, aren't you?'

Her partner's eyes narrowed. He was disgusted. She told herself she didn't care.

'You're cold,' he accused.

'Blind emotions will not defeat Zarkon.' She drifted past him, collecting her blade. 'I have delayed my response to Kolivan long enough. I will return as soon as I've completed work on the ship.'

'You'll _return_ ,' he sneered. 'You'll _go back_. End your little vacation on Earth. Your little experiment in motherhood. Back to _them_. Back to your real people.'

She stopped at the door to their small room and answered simply. 'Yes.'

OoO

Despite his apparent reticence, Keith is always first to volunteer on missions with her, which is a good thing, as she doesn't intend to let him out of her sight any time soon. She feigns disinterest for a time until she remembers that's what got her into this mess in the first place. When the next mission arises, she comes to his room to ask him directly. She finds him sitting against the wall, fast asleep, with the red paladin helmet in his hands.

She wishes she could see him in his paladin armour. Her heart swells when she thinks of it. She has never known pride like this before.

The mission is simple but crucial: Intercept a ship known to carry the quintessence she had been working on, return it to the Blade of Marmora for further study and eventual containment.

It doesn't take long for things to go wrong.

When it happens, it's as though the universe is coming undone molecule by molecule.

Keith–always so watchful, so aware–rushes to block her from the blow of a mangled and reformed Trugg, who lifts him and throws him bodily against a stack of glass containers. They shatter around him and he is swallowed by a steaming soup of violet quintessence.

There is a beat of horrified silence before the room descends into chaos. Trugg falls back, wide-eyed and screaming. She knows what the stuff is capable of now. Her troops follow suit, but not before firing off a couple of potshots. The green, yellow and blue paladins fall on them, ferocious.

The black paladin–Shiro–is running for her son, who is jerkily trying to pull himself to his hands and knees. He slips and groans, his face obscured by his helmet and the muck of quintessence. It rises from his quickly scorching armour in thin tendrils.

'Keith!'

'No! Wait!' she screams.

Shiro skids to a stop, spinning back to face her. He barks an indignant, 'What?'

She jogs past him and whips a sheet of protective covering from the top of a disused console. She is sweating, shaking. _Her son. Her son. Her son_. The image of the beast flashes before her.

'It's too dangerous. We can't touch it. Quick. Help me wrap him up. Try not to touch him.'

Shiro is aghast. 'But–'

'Quick!' she says and throws the tarpaulin over the struggling body at their feet. Keith's fingers scrape uselessly at the floor, gnarled and twisting unnaturally. His gloves have already begun to give at the tips.

OoO

She had just finished packing when the door cracked open. She closed her eyes and sighed when Keith ambled into her lap where she was sitting on the floor. He was especially needy recently. He knew something was wrong. Kogane said as much, but she deflected the idea, insisting it was simply an age thing.

He was breathing noisily, all sick with the cold. He looked up at her, large eyes brimming with childish concern. 'I found it,' he said, sniffing a line of snot back into his nose. She smiled and swiped at it, then rubbed the snot on her trouser leg.

'Found what?'

He opened his pudgy hands to reveal a dead cactus wren chick. His face was glum, but hopeful. He thought she could save the bird, like she saved all the little shrubs he brought to her from around the cabin.

She lifted the wren from his hands and placed it aside. 'Oh Keith,' she said. She pressed kisses to his hair, his cheeks, his filthy hands. 'I love you so, so much.'

'Why, mama?' he asked, voice muffled by her affection. 'Why are you sad?'

'Because you are so beautiful.'

OoO

By the time they get him back to the Castleship, he is pale as a corpse and fitting so badly they have to force a gag between his teeth.

There is nothing they can do, she tells them, except clean him, keep him secure and let the quintessence run its course–whatever the outcome. Fighting his convulsions, they strip him of his armour and shower him down with bright blue Altean powder. He screeches and howls against the wall, asking them: 'Why? Why? Why?' All along his flank and back, his skin is bubbling.

He is mostly still by the time the last of the quintessence is off him. He moans and tosses his head, eyes rolling white.

When she takes his hand in hers, she can already see dark masses forming beneath each soft fingernail. The tips harden before her eyes, eventually cracking the skin right down to the first knuckle. Wicked claws gleam under the med bay lights as pale, pink skin peels away like badly-tanned leather.

'What's happening to him?' asks the blue paladin, horrified. The yellow one pukes in the corner.

She chases the others from the room; all but Coran, the princess and the black paladin.

The gag runs with blood as incisors come loose and are replaced with short fangs. One of them dislodges itself and is replaced moments later by a second fang. The rest of his teeth come in slowly, still flat and square like a human's. She is thankful. Thick lines of blood run from each nostril. A few wet cracks draw eyes to his hands again, which seem longer and larger at the wrist now. Galra hands.

He starts making ungodly noises; guttural, choking gasps–each one sounding like his last.

'Will he live?' asks Shiro, as if he's drowning.

She shakes her head like a guilty, clueless child. She can't speak, just presses herself closer to her boy. He bites past the gag and into her wrist. She screams for both of them.

So foolish, to think him safe in this filthy universe.

OoO

It was a cool, bright morning when she entered the cave where her ship was stored. Kogane–righteous and furious to the last–saw her off, Keith standing clamped by the shoulders in front of him.

'You're really doing it,' he sneered.

'I must.'

'What am I supposed to do with him? What am I supposed to do with our boy?'

Keith looked from his father, to her, to his father again. She had never left his side before. He couldn't possibly conceive what it meant to see her with flight gear on and a bag on her shoulder. 'Mommy?' he asked. 'Mommy?'

She couldn't look at him. His eyes were hateful. He would never forgive her. 'You have to love him for both of us,' she said. She tried to sound kind.

'You're a bitch. Cold bitch. Galra _bitch_.' There was spit on his teeth and chin.

She closed her eyes.

'Okay,' she said, and started walking.

OoO

'Mom?'

She almost falls as she scrambles from her cot to his bedside. 'Keith!' she gasps. She pats at his hair, his cheeks. She hasn't slept properly in days and is sure she stinks. He wrinkles his nose and ducks away like a bothered cat.

In his first short moment of wakefulness after decontamination, Keith saw his hand and fell into a frightening panic attack that ended with Coran sedating him. The Altean advisor spoke of altering ear canals and a whole new world of sensation as her son's ears distended in the span of minutes into galra points. Vomited tonsils and a ruptured appendix, leg bones lengthening by scant but agonising millimetres as skin, still pale, but echoing violet, struggled to catch up. He'd tried to scratch himself blind when his markings came in, sharp and elegant as her own.

The worst of it may be over them, but the memories are fresh: His terrified eyes dancing over each engorged knuckle, and his mouth struggling to work past new fangs. 'Where will it stop?' he'd asked, voice pinched with agony. 'Where will it stop? Mom? Coran? Make it stop! Mom! Mom!' They'd sedated him again.

He is calmer now, but still, he worries at the blanket with one bluntly clawed finger (she'd performed the task of every good galra mother and bit them down when he was sedated). He catches his picking, and closes his eyes.

He still hasn't seen himself.

'How do you feel?' she asks, lifting his hand and placing it between both of hers.

He swallows thickly. 'I want to see,' he says.

'Keith…'

'Mom,' he looks directly at her, eyes steady. 'I'm ready. I have to see. I have to know.'

Brave, she thinks. She nods once and retrieves her tablet from her cot. She holds it to him, watches as he takes in his new appearance. His eyes widen only a fraction as he holds the tablet this way and that like he's at the barber's and not in the middle of an multi-universal war.

A tear slips free from his still-pale eyes. Not so much has changed, she wants to say. He is still her pink, gentle, yearning, Earthling boy. Instead, she reclaims the tablet and lays it on his lap.

'We can fix it. We can try.'

'I look just like you,' he says. He is crying in earnest now. His words crack like the windows in a dusty desert shack. He swipes at his eyes with one arm.

She pulls him into an embrace that's as messy as it is tender.

He issues a strange hiccough. She draws back, confused, stroking the markings on either cheek with the pads of her thumbs.

'I look just like you,' he repeats. Through his tears, he is smiling.


End file.
